You are your first customer, but make sure you're not your last.
This morning (Monday 7th) was one of the precious time slots I mapped out in my diary to go all-in on education. My entire role is pretty much clients paying for my thinking, ideas, and knowledge, and so if I am not constantly learning new things and deepening my own opinions, I don't really have a business.
So today's focus was a replay of a webinar I've been meaning to watch for a while by someone else in the strategy space: I love to make sure I am absorbing different takes on strategy so I don't become too tunnel-visioned in my own.
But then the webinar started with one of my least favourite sentences in business:
You are not your customer.
My initial knee-jerk reaction was to stop watching, but I reminded myself of that non-tunnel-visioned goal and continued on. Eventually, I landed on the fact that I disagree with the idea that it needs to be advice, rather than the sentence itself.
So if you're not your own customer, what are you?
They're right about the thing they're warning against.
Ultimately, the sentiment of “you are not your customer” is a warning about projection. It's aimed at the founder who builds the product they'd personally love, in the style/flavour/approach they'd personally choose, at the price they'd personally pay, and calls that market research.
It's aimed at the business still making decisions in the founder's taste three years after their customers started asking for something else.
And it still exists as advice because so many businesses still make decisions based on what their exec team would be happy with, despite no proof that their customers would be.
Despite the line being repeated more than Gossip Girl in September (too niche?), there are countless examples of successful businesses that started through being a solution to their founders own problem
Grace Beverly often credits her own needs in gymwear with creating Tala, and her own planning and scheduling routine with The Productivity Method planners. The Pret A Manger founder recently talked about how he launched the first branch because of his personal frustration with the lack of fresh, high-quality lunch options in London.
One of my forever favourite examples is Surreal (the adult cereal brand that did £1.5m and 456% growth in its first year). The founders, Jac Chetland and Kit Gammell, were frustrated that all tasty cereal was full of sugar, and healthy cereal tasted like cardboard. So they set out to create a product that solved that very problem.
These founders all started out as their own first customer, but what paved the way for their success is what they did next. They didn't stop at their own needs
If the Surreal founders had stopped at just the fact that they personally wanted better-tasting cereal, they'd have perhaps created a nice-tasting cereal. That could've done OK, it is still a solution to a problem (albeit a weak one). But instead, they went out and conducted proper market research. Checked that other people were facing this same problem and tried to get to the bottom of what they'd want a solution to do. That is how they landed on a nice-tasking cereal aimed at adults with 0g of sugar and high protein. A solution that truly, and specifically, solved the needs of many, rather than only thinking about themselves.
You are your first evidence.
Every business exists to solve a problem. And your positioning all comes down to that: the problem you're solving, and how you're solving it differently to anyone else. That means you have to do two things to have a successful business:
So what better situation to be in than being your own customer and being able to continually test your solution on yourself?
You're the reason you noticed the problem was worth solving, and you're the only person you can interrogate for free, forever.
You'll likely have first-hand, specific knowledge of every existing option and exactly why each one let you down, which is the exact material you need for working out how you'd solve it differently.
You're the very first evidence you have of your business solving a real problem, in the best way possible. That is very valuable, but only if you allow yourself to look beyond customer #1.
If you want to grow beyond yourself being the only customer, you quite simply have to look beyond yourself.
First customer, only customer, forever customer
The reason “you are not your customer” survives as advice is because people think of themselves as their only customer. But whilst you may have been the first, you are not a representation of your full target market.
First customer:
You had the problem, couldn't find a decent solution, so you built one. Then you went to find other people with the same problem and adapted your solution to ensure it served them too.
Some of my favourite clients have started out this way. I'm currently working with a Holiday Let Management company that began by managing their own two properties themselves, and used that skill set to offer to manage others. They've now just hit 50 properties.
I'm also working with a specialist mortgage company for people building their own home, who started when the founder himself was building his own home and struggled to get specialist mortgage advice. He's continually iterated the service and solution offered, so there are different tiers and mortgage types to cater for different people's needs. Growing to a full finance team of over 30 colleagues.
In both cases, they were their own first evidence of their business idea being needed. And they've now managed to scale to reflect the changing needs across their target market. They were their first customer, but definitely not their only customer.
Only customer:
You had the problem, you built a solution, but you never checked whether anyone else was queuing up for it too.
I often see Liquid Death quoted as an example (and I have used it too), but this is exactly what they fell victim to. They built one of the most distinctive water brands by mixing it with heavy metal culture. The fresh take on a traditionally boring industry attracted lots of media attention, but not many sales. It left the UK market in early 2025 on roughly £2 million, which is no small figure until you compare it to others in their market, like Evian, which sold £200+ million. Being distinctive doesn't mean your solution is requested.
Forever customer:
This is the reason why the “you're not your customer” advice gets floated around. You were your first customer; you were right, and the business worked, but then you kept designing for the version of yourself who started it, without accounting for differing or growing needs across the market.
Take my Holiday Let Management company: if they were still offering the exact same service in year one, or only focused on meeting their own needs of managing two sea-front properties, they would not have now bought their fiftieth client on board. Your solution has to adapt to reflect the varied needs across your target market if you want to appeal to more than one person (likely yourself) forever.
So how do you successfully test your product on yourself?
I'm an advocate for being your own customer. But to do that successfully, you need to look at your business like a customer would, not through the lens of being the founder.
When you know your product or service inside out, it's very easy to think everything is sailing smoothly. You already know where that important button is, the answer to any and all questions, and how to actually work the thing. But your paying customer doesn't.
You need to run through your customer journey in the hardest way possible:
You should be your first customer. It's likely the reason you noticed the problem in the first place, and the reason you'll care enough to improve it.
You should use whatever evidence you can get from using your solution yourself. Iterate it continually until it's the best solution on the market, and until you're really confident in what you're offering.
But being your first customer has an expiry date, and the best founders know when to stop relying on themselves as the only evidence.
You are your first customer, but make sure you're not your last.
